In this episode, I'll be sharing a conversation I had with Andrew Weeks, a colleague in the music department at the school where I teach. Andy and I chat about a recent cross departmental project we ran exploring the potential of AI generated music and its likely impact on the music industry as a whole.

It was a warm and thought provoking conversation and I'm excited to share it with you. The AI academia podcast is a weekly show helping educators like you leverage AI in your everyday practice. I'm your host, Andy Fisher, and thanks for joining me. Let's dive straight into the interview. Andrew Weeks, welcome to the AI academia podcast.

Hello, Andy Fisher. So, um, we should begin by spending a little bit of time talking about who you are. And, um, I think it's important to establish that given the project that we've just finished together. Um, and I want the listeners to just get a sense of the journey that you've undertaken, both as an educator and as a musician up to this point.

Like, what's it taken for you to be where you are at this stage in your life? Sure. Yeah. So, hi, I'm Andy and, um, I'm a qualified music teacher, um, working in mostly in secondary, uh, school age. And I've got about 10 years teaching experience, uh, up to A level. And, uh, that involved getting a postgraduate qualification in education.

Um, so you get, uh, uh, a QTS, qualified teaching, uh, status. Um, and since then I've gone on to study for a master's. Um, specifically in orchestration for, uh, film, TV and games music. Um, and I actually carried that out while I was working, uh, while I was about to ask, did you do that whilst you were teaching?

Yeah, so it's a part time, it's a long distance, uh, course. So, uh, you could do the assignments in the evening, um, upload them. Uh, you can dip in and out of lectures. Or if you couldn't make a certain, um, lecture, you could Catch catch up on it later. It was a really good thing particularly with a You know with a full time job it was it made it work Yeah, yeah a huge huge amount and it's always been a dream to write for, uh, I think film was probably, you know, a childhood dream.

Um, but to actually learn how to do that and get a qualification in it, um, has actually led to me being able to go part time. Um, so I did two days, two days teaching and then three days, uh, working on music creation, um, for a variety of, um, models like, um, writing for choirs orchestras, uh, and then specifically commercial music for media, uh, whether that's in TV, um, adverts or short film.

So you, you are the epitome of the idea that it's not true that if you can, you do, and if you can't, you teach because you can and you're teaching. Yeah. And I, you know, I'm not sure I like that expression that much. Me neither. Um, you know, teaching something I came into because, uh, There's so much variety.

There's room for, um, personal growth and career growth. Um, plus you, you're able to give to other people, you know, I think a lot of people sort of worry about what's their purpose in life and actually being able to give skills and give time and energy to other people so that they can level up their skills and develop is, is a really powerful thing.

Um, I mean, one of the, one of the other reasons that I've decided to, uh, in the past couple of years, right. Yes, okay, I want to explore more creative projects, but I've got a young family, so being able to do a little bit less teaching, um, allows me to spend a bit more time, uh, with my girls and also, um, a bit of more flexibility in the weekly schedule.

But yeah, absolutely. But it's it's also an investment in and a degree of faith in your creativity and in the industry, which, of course, we're going to come on to talk about because you're giving up a full time pension and secured income for presumably working within the gig economy. And in a three, you're 60 percent of your income or at least time is coming from.

Your ability to secure work within a competitive marketplace. Absolutely. And I mean, this could come up later in conversation because actually, if I put, um, I don't know, film composer is as a sole proprietorship job, uh, in the reality that that's actually built up, um, with lots of other things. So maybe it's a bit of performance, maybe a little bit of extra teaching that comes my way or, um, for example, I'm working on a.

Contemporary Music Project, um, as a workshop leader. And that's, um, with the Norfolk and Norwich Festival and Contemporary Music for All, which is an organization based in London, but it's nationwide. And it's those sorts of projects which You know, it's not directly composing, but they're little sort of jobs that are more flexible and therefore can build up that package, but you're absolutely right about, you know, about, there's no pension with a, uh, with the gig economy, um, with, with, you know, um, with those sorts of one offs jobs, but, you know, the payoff can also be, can be very good in other ways, particularly in the short term.

Um, you know, when, when you have small Children, Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And that time goes quickly enough as I have experienced now having a 13 year old. It's yeah, those those days don't come back. So, um, I presume also, therefore, in this journey, you have had to make some accommodations for advances in technology within music and music production.

I remember us going on a house trip walk by the coast several years ago now, and you telling me, I think that might been whilst you started doing your studies and you were saying how you were upskilling with some of the sound deck. Work that you were doing and it sounded very complicated and impressive.

So yeah, do you want to talk a bit about that? How you've had to adapt to changes? Yes. I mean, I'd say 50 years ago 50 60 years ago. You would be 40, I think you'd have to go to a music production house, whether that's a label or a professional studio, and they'd have to sign you really as an artist to, um, to, to, to make music and, and to be recognized.

That shifted hugely within, in the noughties and with, you know, in the change of the millennium because music gear is much more accessible. It's much more affordable. So artists can literally write music in their bedroom and yeah, okay, you know, there is going to be difference in quality. But then if you know, like lots of art is subjective, if you say, well, why, if I'm doing it this way, This could be my, my creative voice.

Why does it have to be done with a really expensive studio with, you know, perhaps, perhaps part of my sound is doing it with slightly cheaper gear. Um, and so the industry has become very saturated because you've got more creatives going up. Well, I can, I can be creative. I can do more, but also there is opportunity for people that want to explore because they can have a little setup at home, you know, With, with piano and, uh, uh, and a computer and, and work, um, and, and get paid for it.

You know, um, I've, I've just recently written, uh, an album for TV and that comes with payment and, uh, something called backend royalties. So when it's broadcast onto either adverts or TV or wherever it's used, whether, whether that's music's used, you can get paid, um, for the, uh, Intellectual property, basically.

Yeah. We think about that. You get paid for the music, right? Sure, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so and you've obviously adapted successfully to whatever the changes up to this point have been and perhaps have benefited from them, but then incomes AI from left of field and Fisher with that, because our first kind of conversation about artificial intelligence and music was me having the harebrained idea that, um, for the benefit of listeners who don't know my background, I am One of a number of teachers in my school who are undertaking and a non examined alternative to GCSEs this year that we're offering to our Year 10s.

And I'm doing an introduction to AI, which is a two year course and students basically get an opportunity to explore all the many different facets of AI as they evolve. And that might involve using large language models, image generation, video. And one of the things we explored this term was music. And.

That some of the A. I. Music platforms and I approached Andy really just saying I've got an idea for a challenge where students generate A. I. Tracks using Suno and other platforms like that. Would you be interested in being an adjudicator? And I'd love you to just articulate your first response to that and the conversation we had as you remember it, because I thought that was that was a really useful way of me having to calibrate.

What I was doing because I was pretty much a bull in the china shop, you know I had lots of exciting ideas, but wasn't really thinking about the implications of those ideas well, I mean, you know just going back to the the conversation about how accessible music is to To write. I mean we have you know, we have software where we can write music Which makes it much quicker than pen and paper, you know, you go back to the olden days It would you would have had candlelight and you write it on paper and it's that that's it You know, it's your copy If you wanted a photocopy, you had to get someone else to write that out, you know, so the speed in which technology can help us is is lightning fast.

And even the sample libraries now are so successful. Uh, you know, even 10, 15, 20 years ago, the sampled instruments sounded really clunky and You know, you could tell it was a computerized sound, whereas now they're so smooth, they've been really developed, that you can use some sampled instruments on professional stuff.

You know, on one of Beyonce's new tracks, they used a sample library from one of Spitfire audio samples. And, um, you know, these these tools are super, super effective. Um, and of course, I had to move quickly with those. Um, so with AI coming in, uh, I've got to be on my toes as, as to other people in the industry, because there are loads, there are lots of pros, you know, we can learn, we can use things like chapter UPT and others to, to learn how the skills to write music.

We can, we can, um, use it to help give us prompts for creativity and briefs. There are lots of ways it can be used. Going back to what Andy just asked me about the education competition in school. My. I was, I was shocked initially. It wasn't that, I think partly be because it was, I, I was thinking, what, what am I gonna mark?

What, what am I adjudicating? What am I marking? Yeah. You know, if, if an a, if an ai, uh, mo, uh, model has, has written some music and, and the, the pupils have given them a prompt to write, uh, some, some music, what am I marking them on? You know, am I writing 'em on lyrics? Am I, you know. And it's very hard to judge.

Uh, you know, is that what am I, am I judging stylistically? Am I judging how well AI? Has created music because there aren't much skills and say, oh, can you create this piece of me? Yes, literally it could be a one line prompt couldn't it? And so are you judging the quality of the the one sentence that was typed?

You know because it because with you know It can also generate the lyrics as well as the music if you wanted to do that Yeah, exactly and one of the other things I raised with you was, you know, having gone freelance in the past two years and Seeing the struggles that I and others go through to To make money from music making because um, we have to remember that if we're making music for for fun, it's a hobby and That's great.

Um Since graduating, I've always seen music teaching, music performance, music composition as a profession. Um, and I have skill sets like being able to play instruments and seeing singing and, uh, you know, acoustic qualities. Uh, and I've got some production skills as well. So, um, those skills have sort of taken me, you know, 20 years to develop.

Yeah. And, and I rock up with three weeks of playing around with Suno and say, Well, yeah, would you like to judge our music? Yeah, well, and you know, but this, this sparked up a really interesting conversation for you and I, because Yeah, it did. I was saying, well, wait a second, we're, we're, there's a big debate going on at the moment with AI and, and music and policies being made very, very quickly.

And people are concerned that their jobs are in jeopardy. I mean, it was only a couple, Couple of years ago around, um, the pandemic where the government was asking creatives to retrain inside in cyber, um, jobs and, you know, it's totally insulting and, and, and missing the cultural. Thing there, you know, not I mean, you know money is one value is one value of Growth or success or whatever and if you want to look at it that way you can say right?

Okay. Well the UK music industry brings in billions of pounds To the economy every year. So how like how does retraining in a different? You know direction. How does that benefit the The, the creative person who, uh, values their, their role, um, and, and is viable. Um, so, yeah, there are, there are headwinds and, and huge changes.

Um, I think one of the biggest things that I expressed to you, actually during our first conversation was, you were showing me some music that you'd written and I, and I was thinking, have you published this online? Yeah, which I said, yeah, it's on Spotify. Absolutely. Yeah, it's on all major streaming platforms and I, and I was thinking this is going to be an absolute maze for, you know, for, for everyone, because how do you even tell the difference between an AI computerized, um, you know, you were saying you didn't even, you didn't even need to specify that it was made by AI.

No, there was no requirement for me to now, maybe in the future that will happen, but at least when I uploaded those tracks, um, I had to say that I, I had some part in the production of them, which is why I identified myself as the producer and mixer, which was enough, I guess, which is if you were doing electronic music, perhaps that that's a similar way in which you need to identify the originality of the work.

Um, so yes, and really, I uploaded it. More than anything else as an experiment to see whether I could go from never having produced any music at all to getting something that someone could if they wanted to, you know, download on Spotify or iTunes and have in their playlist. I think I have an audience of two, which is my son and my wife, so I don't think I'm breaking any records.

Soon, but but you're quite right in saying the process was very easy for me to be able to commercialize the work if I wanted to Yeah, because I think that you know as as someone who has got music released on stream platforms, and I like many we don't actually earn revenue from Streams we do, you know, it's something like, you know, ten pounds here Because it's not point something People play.

Um, so the, the, the, you know, the big shift 10 years ago was, well, streaming is now people have had to, to agree that that's a thing. Like you, you either have your music on there or you don't. And a lot of people think, well, it's good for exposure. Let's put it on. But it's not like CD sales and vinyl sales and, you know, iTunes sales where people used to buy whole albums if they really enjoyed the artist.

You can access so much music now. And, um, The subscription fee that you pay to Spotify, very, very little goes back to the artists. Um, so, you know, there are some, some ethical discussions here, but I think when you pointed out that you could put your, your AI generated music on there, this is the first I'd heard of it.

And I was thinking, how are you going to tell the difference? You know, when you're, when you're listening through who's created that, um, without a little, without a little subtitle saying AI generated music. Which, which educationally, I think would be helpful for people. Yeah, absolutely. Is it, is it real my own Miles Davis or fake Miles Davis?

Yeah, and and and actually I know we're jumping ahead a little bit now, but we had a conversation a few days ago about the silent album that was released as a protest album by Paul McCartney and others who are basically releasing that album to say human artists should be at the center of the music industry and not.

not algorithms. Um, and it'll be interesting to see whether that achieves any traction given the of the individuals involved. Um, and I, you quite rightly sort of said, well, look, you know what, what, how am I going to judge this? And so we, we arrived in for the challenge. We arrived at an interesting idea, which is that we'd get the students to generate a track that they enjoyed, what was their favorite track they'd created.

And then I would seed into. Uh, that collection three human tracks off differing styles of artists that would be lesser known, perhaps, which I paid for and downloaded. Um, and didn't distribute wider than our class. Um, and then you undertook the challenge of first of all, listening to all 13 tracks and seeing if you could decipher which of the 13 were human.

And quite correctly, you got All of the answers correct there. Unlike some of our students, though, interestingly, um, and that was because they took part in this challenge as well. And many of them you bought your middle five or year 10 musicians in. And we had this to, um, class conference, didn't we? To kind of Bring the challenge to a close.

So so one. The first challenge was can you identify the human tracks and not only did you but you articulated how you could tell the difference beautifully because an eye is an untrained listener wouldn't have made the observations you did about the limitations of what instruments can and can't do.

You picked out. In my case, a lyric that wouldn't normally have been in a song because it just didn't work correctly, even though I'd written it. Actually, it wasn't AI generated, but I'm not a musician. So you very skillfully identified that if you've got a trained ear, you will be able to discern this for the time being.

But most people don't. And as you said, at the time, most people playlist whilst there, Yeah. Washing up or going on walking the dog and perhaps we're going to end up with a two tier audience of those discerning listeners who appreciate human music and then perhaps others who can't tell the difference.

Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how things evolve. Absolutely. I mean, yeah, that challenge was was brilliant because the students really got involved in the discussion as a result of it. And I think educationally we got way more out of it. Um, Doing it this way around to sort of rather than rank them in terms of which one I liked the best We yeah, we never end up doing that.

Actually, did we? Yeah, no, you know that I mean there were some that worked I worked better, you know, there are some AI Productions that I felt had a little bit more of an edge than others And some of them were subjective reasons. Some of them were production reasons those sort of things, but I think generally it was a really useful And relevant topic for them to engage in.

Yeah, and yeah, I think they also it was quite telling that because I had set it up that we would end up with the top three. So once we'd identify which were the human tracks, you would say which, which of the 10 you listen to that were AI generated, do you think were the inverted commas best the ones that you enjoyed the most?

And because the conversation. Went in different directions. We actually never got to that point, but nor did any of the students complain that we hadn't come up with a winner, which I thought was quite telling that the conversation around ethics and music was far more valuable to them than who might win or not win in an arbitrary competition.

Yeah, so we should talk a little bit perhaps about the what we talked about as the sort of positive and shadow sides of. A. I. Music as we see them on. I'll just kind of whistle through the positives because and now I think we should linger more on the concerns because I think that's where we both as practitioners have kind of landed on this one.

So we said that a I. Music to a degree democratizes the process. Um, that anyone who wants to be able to express their musical, um, passions could do so through a I or augment with a I. Um, it definitely allows us to bypass industry gatekeepers. My Small collection of songs on Spotify. I testify to that being the case.

Um, in the conversation I had with one of our alumni yesterday, Bailey Tudnam, who is, do you remember Bailey? Did you come across him? He remembers you fondly. Yeah, it was interesting. He was one of those people who sort of, um, you know, his voice started development and and he really got into it quite late on in the school.

Yeah. So he sort of, you know, by the time he had of really lovely performances. He was, he was an upper six and you think, Oh, he got one. There's only one year and then he's gone. So that was, uh, it's one of those moments. And now of course, you know, he's, he sings really well and, and, um, and is really interested in contemporary music.

Have you stayed in touch? Yeah, he's definitely come back a couple of times and he worked on a songwriting, uh, uh, Event that we did, uh, okay. So Bailey was telling me that one of the things he had done recently was to use Suno for him to sing. He wanted to come up with a duet and he sang the female part into Suno and then had it converted into a female voice, but retaining the melody and then he could download that and then record both tracks simultaneously to get a sort of, um, I guess what we call it in in Sculpture.

We call it a maquette, a rough outline, a sketch, you know, a working piece that he could then give to the prospective female talent to say, this is what I'm looking towards. And I thought that was an interesting example of using an AI tool to augment a workflow rather than Displace the human creativity.

Um, so, so those were some of the positives. And you've already mentioned the cost involved in using some of these technologies can definitely, um, lower the barrier to entry. Um, but should we now begin by talking a bit about the way in which AI systems seem to have acquired their database of information because that was one of the first things when we talked about scraping the Internet and intellectual property rights, that was one of the definite things that I think was concerning you, wasn't it?

Yeah, definitely. And if you don't mind, if I just go back to the your point on democratization of access. Yes. Okay. You know, like, for example, the CEO of Suno is saying, uh, he famously said in an interview that People don't want to write music anymore. It takes too long. I think that's absolutely wrong. And there are so many creators that will feel offended by that because it's actually a lifelong journey.

It's a, it's a lifelong passion. It's a sort of journey of growth and those Explorations of technique of creating sound of making music with other people is, um, is, is, is not boring. It's not dull and yes, it does take time, but then the hard things do take time and hard things are worth doing because they're hard as well.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, as a species, we, I don't think we will grow if we just. Sit back and say, Oh, well, let's just have an everything easy. Um, but just in terms of the access point, one of his main points in an interview, um, that he did live was that. We're, we're, we're allowing, you know, millions of people to access music in a way that they haven't been able to before.

And I sort of understand that, but I also sort of don't because they're not, they're not getting access to guitar lessons. They're not getting access to, um, music. Uh, theory, uh, you know, educational, um, they're not learning anything from the process. They've got access to pressing a button that gives them something very, very quickly.

And so I'm not quite sure I agree with the, the access bit because we have enough problems with access at the moment. You know, there are, there are divides in society where if you can afford to have musical lessons, you pay for them. If you can't afford to have music lessons. You don't. And, you know, there's a big fight in state schools.

I think for a long time now, a lot of schools have been getting away with music as a subject, whereas some, some schools, some state schools have classroom music in their curriculum and they have a bit of budget to provide instruments for people to have a go on. It doesn't matter if they carry on with it, it's just so they can have a, have a go.

So that accessibility for me is really, really, um, Is key, you know the fact that you that that we can give a computerized The robot powerful robot, you know these the these Um ai computers, I don't you probably know way more about them than I do but they have this huge power and to create amazing things and do Incredible equations and, you know, lightning fast.

That is, that is an incredible thing. And it's great that we have access to these, um, as soon, as soon as a company adds a price tag to it, that's where we, we get into the realms of ethics and, uh, thinking about what. What actually is the the the the gate? What are the gains here? so my my initial concerns with you with a I music was Well, if we're gonna if we're gonna look at this, let's look at this properly get under the bonnet because it's actually Scaring a lot of creatives who are in a freelance environment or, um, if you know, if music is their, their career from a, from a performance side, because people will still crave going to performance, um, performances.

But, you know, if, if you can use AI music commercially. Which a lot of companies are not allowing. So if you're if you work in music for TV or music for games, they're not actually allowing a I music to be used in their projects yet because they're not up for the legal battle because it's all up in the air right now.

Yeah, which is which is good at the moment. But with policies, government policies moving very, very fast, they want. To encourage, you know, growth in tech, growth in AI tools, because it is going to speed up processes, make things, um, you know, cheaper and affordable. And, you know, there are going to be so many amazing benefits.

Um, but, you know, this whole going, you know, you're talking about scraping, um, the internet of recordings and existing music out there. And I'm just thinking of that. Hours, the tens of thousands of hours that not only go into learning an instrument or writing or, uh, orchestrating and performing, and then you've got a recording engineer who's doing all of this work, this has been tens of thousands of, of, of hours of work per person to, to come up with these, um, bits of music, which, um, AI models have access to the largest catalog in human history of music.

Um, you know, companies like Suno will argue, well, actually, um, you have that as a human, you have access to all of that music anyway, and you can learn from it. So we're not doing anything wrong here. AI can just do it. Just much quicker than you, they can learn from it much quicker. The bit I have an issue with it, of course, AI, you can learn from it straight away, but as soon as you start replacing jobs, you know, human jobs, that's when it becomes a big issue for me because I can see that some of the more generic music, if there are companies who can say, well, I can get this for cheap or little to low cost, you are way more cheaper and quicker than a human for generic music, then I will go with that.

Um, so there, there, I can see a shift coming. Uh, quite soon. So live, please stop me if you want me to no, no, no, no, no, no direction at some point, but library music is something that composers do on the side because it's a good little money earning earner. The more times it gets broadcast on radio or TV or wherever it gets placed, it can get placed on social media these days, for example, and and people can get royalties for their music being used because they own the rights for For the master for the the actual product that you've produced that you've given it World and then you can get royalties back for the usage of it.

And I can see library music. You know, the library music is already got vast catalogs of human music. Uh, and I can see, you know, some of the AI music is, is very convincing it, and it can do things like yoga music very well. It can do quite repetitive music quite well. Um, and I can see some of those, uh, jobs being.

Yeah, I think I did a fantasy epic cinematic soundtrack did my live went to demonstrate how soon it worked. It sounded absolutely fantastic. You know, the production that the the The sound of the strings on there, it's so, it was so convincing Andy, and that's scary because if you're, if you're a company going, right, I need a bit of music for this advert that we're going to put on Facebook, it just needs to be a small 20 second clip.

Here's AI. Can you give me some music for this? Um, and A lot of companies have to sign up for, um, subscriptions to people like art list or audio network or these libraries of music where they, they, they, they have the license basically. Um, and these could be thousands of pounds per year for a company to say, right, well, I've got a license for this.

So therefore the artists. Have their music used in an advert for a company. They will then get the royalties, but I can see particularly for these sort of small, uh, smaller sections of music that that could go to. Um, music, which, yeah, and it's important to say when you talk about sound libraries and generic music, it's not a comment on the originality or creativity of the artist.

This is what the client wants that, you know, elevator music. They want something that's going to be background that's not particularly drawing attention that fits into a certain genre. Yeah, but you know. That can be a bit of bread and butter because, um, not every piece of music is going to be monetized for an artist, which, uh, is fine because a lot of people, uh, want to create music for the love of it, not necessarily for sales.

They didn't get into music for sales necessarily, but if you are writing some, some library music, which some of it can be extremely good, very creative, very, um, All the way from from starting to writing themes all the way through to to the production of of so I did a folk album recently and I brought live players on.

So I was playing some accordion. My friend was playing some fiddle and so they can sound absolutely great as as a project. Um, so I'm not dismissing library music is just being wholly generic. There is a huge amount of creative energy that goes into there and people get paid to write music, you know, and that's a that's an amazing thing.

Yeah, so. And I think that that's where I've come to draw the line for myself. Like if I've created, I made a song for Susie, my wife. Um, and it was, it was, in fact, it was the one I played in, in our, um, challenge, um, uh, lifeboat. And it was inspired by something she had said one morning at breakfast. And I wrote the lyrics as a poem and then set it to music and then played it for her.

And it was a lovely thing. For us to share, but I'm not then trying to put that into the world and get into the top 40 or put it, you know, I don't want a company to pick it up and pay me residuals. Um, just because I make my living as an English teacher and I don't want to live in a world that's populated by homogenized derivative content.

Created by AI. I want people like you to be out there expressing their originality and then me being able to because I think you said earlier about we shouldn't strive to do away with hard things because we won't evolve that way. And I think that hits the nail on the head, doesn't it? That if AI is serving us, it's taking away the drudgery of life and the repetitive mundane and will leave us with what makes us uniquely human.

Yeah, absolutely. It needs, it needs to help us with science exploration, needs to help us with some of the, you know, cleaning the dishes, the things that are perhaps a little bit more tedious, um, uh, or, or challenge, you know, helping us with challenges. The, um, I just wanted to go back to the workflow thing because, um, I can, I think this is where I, I can be really, really useful.

You know, if you're creating a backing track or, um, you want to practice singing with a duet as Bailey was doing. Yeah. You can have this, um, you know, this tool to create a realistic singer singing a different line so that you can focus on singing your line. So then you can work on your, um, uh, singing in harmony or, you know, whatever skills you're trying to learn from that.

And I think that sort of Enhancement of workflow is fantastic. You know, I think that the power of a I to be able to do things will help us work faster and do some of those things better. Um, yeah. Yeah. Um, so it's interesting what you're I was just gonna say. So you're not advocating that musicians should put a moratorium ban on a I so much is that we should use it to augment what we do without taking away.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, let's say, um, you put a prompt into AI and said, I would like a track that sounds like this Ed Sheeran track. Um, please produce one for me so that I can use it for, I don't know, um, my cake sale at the weekend. All right, but let's put this on a larger scale. We want to use it on the Nike advert.

The Nike have lots of money and, um, uh, You know, people like Honda, for example, paid a whole choir to do, um, an advert for them. And it was brilliant, and people loved watching it. And they, they saw the voices, they saw the whoosh coming past. And people benefit from that. There's creativity involved. You know, that helps pay the bills, um, et cetera, et cetera.

But if you ask AI to get an Ed Sheeran copy of something, You, you are displa I mean, not that Ed Sheeran needs it, But you're displacing Ed Sheeran, because He doesn't benefit from that at all because you're not using his track you're going to be doing something using something like it But I just don't understand I don't see where the win is in there so using it for commercial use I think should be just stopped because Yes, okay, you can allow AI access to recordings and music from from history, but to then Make money out of it You haven't asked permission and this is where I think it's, it's, it's, there's a very big gray area here because, you know, you, we do learn from other artists and we do learn from previous composers before us because we have to, we have to develop our skills somewhere, but there, we still have copyright in place to, to, to safeguard those original artists because if you plagiarize their music and you, and you write it, Uh, a sequence that is just lifted from someone else's work, they can take you to court.

Yeah. But at the moment, there's nothing to stop people, um, uh, AI to use people's music and just steal elements and, you know, maybe think people will be able to pick up and say, well, you just lifted that, that bit from, from my song, but who's created that? You know, there's, it's a very, very gray area. And I wonder, I think that probably it will be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle at this stage without fairly, uh, draconian measures being imposed by government and or, or providers to say, well, you know, we're just not going to allow it.

And we need to have evidence of the process to show it's human generated. Um, but I, I wonder whether if we'd got ahead of all of this at the start. Someone could have created an algorithm with a known body of work that trained the algorithm and those artists had consented to the process and received the cut of any profits generated from the output.

Exactly, exactly. Those, you know, those sorts of things would be ethically, uh, ethically good. But I think particularly if you have living artists, um, you know, there, there are things around sampling, um, music that is, Um, 50 years after the death of a composer, um, you can, you, you can then start using their music, uh, to sample it for artistic purposes.

Uh, and people have, you know, artists have done that, use that creatively to, to enhance or even pay homage to artists before, because they've highlighted their work in their work. Um, and so, you know, it's just about who are the winners here, um, Andy, you know, um. The, the AI, uh, companies that, um, do sell, um, you know, there's the AI music who's gaining from that.

They certainly are with million pound turnovers. Um, but the individuals, I'm not sure that they do. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, um, I'm not convinced that. I mean your experience of, of, you know, having putting your lyrics and then having some music to your lyrics That's cool. Like and I the speed of it. I think is just insane, isn't it?

You know because something you can spit out in like 15 seconds. Yeah, it's remarkable But you know and and Where, you know, where does this go? We have, we have, like you say, opened, you know, open the let the genie out. Um, but I think that I think we can still put policy in place, particularly when it comes to the lives of people.

And, and importantly, the You know, the, the ownership of, of, of creative things that people have put a lot of time and effort into And I also have some faith in humanity to the degree that, um, somebody said a couple of days ago. We know that computers can beat most human players at chess, but no one's going to sit and watch a match between two computers playing chess because what makes a chess competition so interesting is we're watching people pitting against one another.

And I'm sure that there's a machine out there that could 3D print a duplicate of David or the Pieta. No one's going to go travel across the. The world to see that I don't think yeah, um, I think, I think there are some, some, some real positives out of this as well. I think I agree with you that people are going to start yearning for, uh, for music that is created by humans because there is a bit more flow.

There is a more connect connection there. And you know, I can't see people I think it will be like when, you know, when, when electronic music first sort of started getting more popular and you could create a whole piece, maybe with you rapping or singing on top. And then all of the accompaniment, it was electronic sounds.

I think people started to hear that coming through and, and, and seeping its way into the music industry. And people were yearning for that. Some of that 90s bands. Um, yeah, it was just so raw and, you know, And, and, you know, and meaty so that that we've already experienced that in a way so, um, and another sort of positive angle on this is I've seen some of the music that I can create and it is good in, in sort of small chunks, but it can't yet.

Yet it cannot do long form things. Yeah. For example, some of the projects I'm working on at the moment are You know, 30 minutes in length. So writing music that goes in and out of that and the, the, um, uh, what's the word when you, when you review, um, review something, um, sort of when, when you, you send through a demo of like, this is what the queue is going to sound like.

Okay. Oh, they'll send revisions, right? Revisions, how they want it to be tweaked. This sounds good here. Could you change that? Yeah. This could be a little bit more like that. Um, can we explore this and that? You could go to and fro with an AI model and it's still not going to do what you want. In fact, it gets worse in my experience so far.

Because the context isn't retained, and so you get one thing right, but something else goes wrong. And it's very hard to end up with where you want to be. You end up compromising. Sure. Uh, and so, I think for these little sort of, you know, small, um, very quick, like small attention span things, it's very, very impressive.

But as soon as you work on larger scale projects, whether that's a musical theatre production, or, um, a whole TV series, or whatever, you're We're going to come up trumps, as humans, because directors can work with you and say, I need that tweaked, this is sounding great, but I'd quite like that to be scored slightly differently.

And even though it may take longer, they're going to come out with an absolutely tippity top. Um, Creative products that Yeah, I mean, absolutely. That's the case. Now, whether whether I evolves to be able to accommodate that, who knows? But But the thing I wanted to kind of wrap things up with is probably the biggest takeaway I got from our work together on this was that the thing that was missing from all of the generations is the cultural context in which the music was born.

Um, Weekend before we ran that competition. I'd been in. I think I mentioned to you that I was in London listening to a singer songwriter in a church in the middle of London. It was an Australian musician. And, um, he played a set and at the beginning of every song before he played, he gave us a little bit of a narrative, you know, the anecdote of what inspired this story and then he played it.

And even though if you were listening to his album, you wouldn't have had the benefit of those stories. It was very clear that these stories were coming from a human life and they were encapsulating the experiences and the stories and the emotions. That that individual had gone through and then his music had been a way of articulating that feeling.

It was culturally bound up and, you know, we don't see that in AI music. And after a while you listen to it and go, it's another one of those pieces where we're going to build to a crescendo. And we've got that, you know, we, the humanness is not easy. To fake. And if you could, I think there'd be a net loss for humanity because music has always been something into which we've couched who we are, not just what we can create.

Yeah. And I, you know, even before I was coming out with this, we, we have been seeing some cultural changes, you know, for example, the streaming platforms, um, which, by the way, I put mine stuff out there because I want, I want to be able to reach people and I want people to, Be able to access some of the music I write and it's a very powerful way to do that.

Um, You can't you cannot it's a very bureaucratic system So I'm only allowed to have title and name, nothing else. I can't have, let's say I did a classical recording, I can't say who the violin soloist is, I can't say who the conductor is. They're very, very specific about having less information on there.

Who is making, who are making those decisions? And also, if an artist says that they want to have something different, and I'm not talking about explicit things, I'm talking about, you know, General information or like they want that you want to have a specific artistic statement on the front of an album You have people in in in the in the middle saying well, we want us to be completely uniform.

Well, why why is that the case? and We you know, we're in In a society where, you know, people, um, even companies do this. They, they, we crave little tidbits of, of attention seeking things. And people's attention spans are so small now. They can't even listen to a piece of music that's longer than two minutes because they're sort of, Oh yeah, I don't want to invest in that.

And it's really concerning for me, you know, Radiohead did a really lovely example where they didn't put an album on, on streaming services. They said, if you want, if you want to listen to this, buy the CD or I think even better, they said, well, if you want it for free, you can have it for free, just pay what you think it's worth or, or, you know, contribute whatever you like.

And the thing I love about that is that they've got all the information inside. They've got the lyrics, they've got a little bit about the song. They've got a little bit of background about the band, maybe about the process, the journey they went through. And we're losing that in society. Um, and you know, even, even, um, my wife said, Oh, can we put some of those CDs away?

Can we, can we get rid of them? You never listened to them. I said, well, true. They are there, they're tangible. And also if I want to, I can go and open up the sleeve and I can just read a little bit more about what that, that one's about. I can't do that on Spotify. There's or, or Apple, there's, there's no option for me to go and read more about the inside of.

Of that album and so I think culturally there are some questions here as well that Need to be raised with policymakers Um, but also with one to one conversations like we're having Um, what do we value as a society? Do we value short? snappy Things that grab people's attention or do or do we value? The the sometimes years of effort that goes into producing something which is could be a passion a lifetime passion There's, there's, um, you remind me of a, an old Japanese story about, um, an artist who, um, I, I'm going to butcher it.

So, and I'm simplifying, but basically a Lord commissioned an artist to do a painting of a crane and the artist agreed to do it, but said it would take a year. For this piece of work. So the artist goes away and a year to the day they turn up with this, uh, box, and he hands into this box, the scroll of the heron that's been painted, and the Lord opens it up and it's beautiful.

And he says, it's everything I'd hoped it would be. And on the way home and monsoon hits and the water gets into the trunk and it destroys the painting. So they, the, they send a message back saying, look. It's gone. We're going to commission you to do it again, please. And a day later, the artist sends the scroll back with a new painting.

So the Lord sends soldiers because he's outraged by this. Why did you make me wait a year? And they're just about to kill the artist and they burst into his studio and everywhere on the floor on the walls are these paintings, these failed paintings of herons. And yet the reason he can do it now so quickly is for a year, he failed and failed and failed to get to this point.

Mastery, you know, exactly. Yeah. But you wouldn't know that if you hadn't got inside his art inside his studio. That's like opening the sleeve to the CD, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, um, yeah, it does worry me that, um, you know, and And. I think I hope I made my point clear. Yeah, absolutely. What we should wrap it up is the conversation.

I hoped we would have and it's it feels like it brings all of the strands together that we've been talking about. And what I'm hoping is alongside the AI community that there will be a number of musicians and producers and people in your field who might Hook into this conversation and have some, some useful takeaways and also broaden their conversation around AI, because I think, you know, we don't want to polarize it so that we end up with those who embrace AI and those who refuse to engage with it.

We need to all be in dialogue to figure out what's best for society. Thank you very much. Good to see you. Thanks for listening. And I hope you enjoyed that interview with Andrew Weeks. Please do spread the word. If you think others would like the show and do check out the AI academia YouTube channel.

Where you'll find practical tutorials that compliment the topics covered on this podcast. Have a great week. And I look forward to catching up again soon.